Dear President Obama:
Congressman John Conyers has reintroduce HR 676, his single-payer healthcare bill in the 111th Congress.
Former Sen. Tom Daschle, your nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, once called for "a government-run insurance program modeled after Medicare" in testimony before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions as part of the solution to our healthcare crisis.
This is fine, if it means “Medicare for All.” The problem is not to pressure big insurance companies to make health care “affordable.” The problem is to provide the American people with an alterative to the monopoly they currently have, and abuse.
In August of 2005, The National Coalition on Health Care found in a fiscal analysis of health care reform that "the single payer model would reduce costs by over $1.1 trillion over the next decade while providing comprehensive benefits to all Americans." Single-payer is the only reform proposal that can claim cost savings and comprehensive health care for all.
Some argue that HR 676 is "not politically feasible," but that's a chicken's protest, not an acceptable position. We elect our government officials to serve the public interest, and the public overwhelmingly supports a national health care plan.
HR 676 would help control costs by emphasizing prevention and universal access to basic care instead of reliance on emergency room care--the most costly and least efficient method of healthcare delivery. We can't afford not to adopt HR 676.
HR 676 would improve healthcare outcomes and eliminate racial, geographic and other disparities which currently plague our nation.
All the other advanced democracies adopted national healthcare, none have seriously considered eliminating these systems, and all enjoy better healthcare results than we do including: longer life expectancy, lower infant mortality rates, fewer work-days lost to illness, and many other measures of health and wellness.
I urge you to reject policies that are friendly to for-profit health care corporations, which put private profits over public health and will not and cannot solve our healthcare crisis.
William J. Kelleher, Ph.D.
